karijini, part 1

john and i purchased a campervan for our upcoming cross-australia road trip. but soon after we picked the van up, we decided to do a test-run road trip. destination: karijini national park. so john, betty (the campervan) and i headed north.

karijini is incredibly far from, well, just about everything. it took us 16 hours of driving (with one overnight stop) to arrive. the drive went mostly like this: drive, drive, drive, dead kangaroo, dead kangaroo, dead kangaroo, live goat, live goat, live cow, emu emu emu, dead kangaroo, drive drive drive, dead kangaroo. for 16 hours.

you can imagine how happy we were to finally arrive at karijini. we'd heard many a wonderful thing about this national park, the only national park that i think (so far anyhow) deserves the title "national park". we explored the visitors centre before embarking on another challenging drive further into the park. 38km of unsealed roads (and a whole lot of rattling) later, we pulled into our first stop, the Eco "resort". it's not exactly what i would consider a resort, but they're upscale tents did look kind of interesting. we were just looking for a campsite, which in australia is a pretty loose term. naturally, they placed us in an area already full of people, instead of in another one of their more open loops.

we settled betty in for the night and took off to explore the first of many gorges- joffre falls. a short saunter from our "campsite" lead us to the entrance to this gorge. it was surprisingly beautiful- red earth as hard as iron (mostly because it is all iron...) and water at the bottom. we clambered a few hundred meters down into the gorge and then walked along the bottom to the falls themselves. john felt keen enough to venture through the small pond/lake at the base and climb up to the top of the falls. i decided to stay down low and watch.

i'm told that during the wet season, joffre gorge is a great place to hop on an old innertube and make your way lazily down the river in the gorge. it definitely wasn't the wet season.

we climbed back out of the gorge and met up with betty to have some dinner and much needed rest. the next few days had a lot of exploring ahead.

xo